Faith and the Brain

So there's an author, one Sam Harris, who I think I want to read up on. He
apparently wrote two books generally attacking faith and religion, The
End of Faith and Letters to a Christian Nation, and has now
returned to doctoral work in neurology, where he claims to be finding
more-damaging evidence. At least, that's what this
article on Time.com claims.

Harris has been making fMRI brain scans of people as he asks them different
questions from seven categories: mathematical, geographic, semantic,
factual, autobiographical, ethical and religious. (I'm not exactly sure how
'factual' differs from mathematical or geographical, but maybe it's a
miscellaneous category.) He claims that, though some concepts get 'special
treatment' in 'higher' parts of the brain, belief and disbelief are each
marked by activating two distinct parts of the brain. Belief activates the
same area that's associated with smell and pleasure, and disbelief activates
the area associated with taste and pain (or 'disgust' in general). This is
the same regardless of if the question is one of addition or the ethical
status of torture.

That's all well and good, but in particular, toward the bottom, Harris makes
the remark: "The whole thing will seem fishy to anyone who thinks we have
immaterial souls running around in our bodies." And that is what I take
issue with, actually -- because I don't see anything wrong here, and nothing
seems fishy. And I strongly believe in spiritual reality.

I guess I just don't understand why there must be a conflict between faith
and reason -- why there's a strong, implicit battle between religion and
science. I guess, in this case, I understand it almost in terms of
psychosomatic illness or, more accurately, the give and take between
physical and mental illness. Someone can develop symptoms for diseases they
don't have if they really believe they have it. It comes down to the
fact that I believe body and soul to be a unit, and if we concede that one
part of a person's makeup and affect other parts, how is it troubling or
even really surprising that the soul and biologic brain work in concert?
Why is it even a concern at all to say, "see, your thoughts activate areas
of your brain?"

WiFi Piggybacking

So there's short
article on WirelessWeekly.com which claims that 54% of wireless users
admit to having used someone else's wireless access at some point, a
practice often referred to as piggybacking. The article calls this use
'stealing' and lumps piggybackers under the heading of "cybercriminals"
along with identity thieves, phishers, malicious hackers, spyware vendors,
et cetera.

Now, I'm not one to generally condone a tyranny of the majority, but you
have to wonder about the validity of a law that would criminalize more than
half the population. (Sure, duels to the death were once legal, and we all
know killing of any kind is wrong...) But more than that, as noted in the
Techdirt
cover article, you have to be careful about what you call crime. If they
had to crack your security -- a password or encryption or something, they
yes, that's a crime; cracking security measures is a crime. If they riffled
through your documents, or installed software on your machine, yes, that's a
crime; invasion of another person's computer is a crime. But if the only
'crime' they've committed is using a wireless access point that was left
open and broadcasting... that's not really a crime.

I'm about to get really fast internet access at home, on the order of
5x faster than anything I've had before. And I have every intention of
setting it up so that passersby can hop a ride on my connection if they need
it -- I'll be careful to have it properly isolated from my personal
computer, and I'll throttle it so that they can't impinge on the bandwidth I
plan to use myself, but it'll be there, intentionally open for public
use. The argument seems to be, "you didn't pay for it, so you're
stealing if you're taking it. But I disagree. In my case, it's *intended*
to be open for use; what's to differentiate my open WiFi access point from
any others? It's that's NOT what you want, if you want people to stay off
your network, even WEP is enough to "keep honest men honest."

There have been a lot of times when me or my friends, being strangers in a
foreign land or neighbors waiting for the ISP to send a technician out,
would have appreciated an open access point to get directions or check
email. For my part, I see nothing wrong* with offering that to others.


*The caveat being, obviously, that if someone is piggybacking on your
network to perform illegal activities, that inclines one to shut the whole
thing down. Ideally, I would set up a firewall/proxy to filter
outgoing traffic on the open access point, to make sure nothing bad
is going out from my network. That's called being a good neighbor (to the
Internet). That's not always possible for people, but like i said, even WEP
is enough to keep honest men honest, and then if they're on your network it
IS a crime.

You Can Make Money From Free

So, it's always nice to hear about another band
getting the hint and figuring out that better distribution of music means
more fans which means more money from live shows and merchandising. These
guys aren't big -- or at least I've never heard of Big Head Todd and the
Monsters -- but just a few weeks ago 50 Cent was saying the same thing, and
one of my favorite bands, Abney Park, made a point a while back that they
don't need a recording label. And they don't. When you can distribute your
own music and promote yourself, what can a label offer you? It's even been
proven that it doesn't really have to be free -- people are more than
willing to pay about a dollar for tracks of known quality from a reputable
seller, will gladly choose non-DRM over the alternative, and file-sharing
doesn't hurt artists.

In related news, the CEO of Universal Music is an idiot. In
an interview, he readily admits that he doesn't understand anything about
technology, doesn't even know enough to hire people who can tell him about
technology, and laments the days when his job was easy and he could just sit
back and watch the money roll in. He's got some great quotes, too. From
the Techdirt article: When asked about giving up money now to be able to
make more later, Morris tells the interviewer that if you do that, then
"someone, somewhere, is taking advantage of you." that line made me
thing of a Far Side comic: Anatidaephobia, the fear that somewhere, somehow,
a duck is watching you. It's mania is what it is. The best is when he
makes the analogy that file sharing is like having Coca-Cola coming out of
your kitchen faucet; how much would you be willing to pay for Coke? As the
Techdirt points out, that's a dumb analogy to make because people
have water coming out of their faucets, and still pay Billions
on bottled water. And that's not even really of known quality, just
dubiously-better quality.

One final point before I shut my trap on Intellectual Property for a bit.
There's A
Bill right now that's been lobbied for by the recording industry which
would apparently create a new government agency for the enforcement
of Copyright law, as well as make the penalties (which obviously aren't ridiculous
enough) even more harsh. Full disclosure: I generally think
Intellectual Property as a concept ought to be abolished. The laws, which
were enacted to ensure creators and innovators got credit and
reward for their work, now stifle innovation and punish people for
derivative works. Copyrights now outlive their creators by decades.
Perhaps a loose set of rights with a life of ten to fifteen years would be
alright, so that artists can still be sure they're going to get something
for their effort, but 50 Years?

Anyways, now I'm rambling. The final point was that even people
who are avowedly pro-IP are against this "pro-IP" bill, for many of the
same reasons I just quoted. Copyright is meant to be used as incentives to
create, not a cudgel to beat down competitors.

Late's better than never...?

I may be late, but apparently there is a bill which is being voted on today
in the Senate which includes an "immunity clause" for ISPs, essentially
saying that if an ISP breaks the law in the service of the government, then
they aren't responsible. I shouldn't need to point out how scary that is.
There is a page Here
where you can send a form letter to your representatives. Whenever you see
this, I suggest you do so.

Fight for the Little Guy

This
article, which boils down to a group of legal-minded people assisting
someone in the face of a Cease-and-Desist bully, kinda makes me want to go
to Law School myself.